Forecast

There are plenty of books on the climate crisis, but a readable one is rare enough to fetch a Nobel Peace Prize. Though solutions depend on specific and possibly boring knowledge and actions, political and public support requires general understanding and passionate attention. This book is written not by a committee nor as the result of group findings, but by an individual writer--not a scientist or a politician but an astute and acute journalist. It is that rarity: excellently reported and written, very readable and therefore an important book on the most significant topic of our time. It's a post-Inconvenient Truth treatment that doesn't analyze or speculate but describes. This isn't about the far future, but changes already underway that are bound to increase in the next few decades: "impacts that range from the subtle and sometimes benign to the horrific and potentially catastrophic...Yet we don't have to guess at the consequences of a warming world...The future of our planet can be found now, on the frontiers of climate change." My one note of warning is that dealing with the effects of the climate crisis, as described in this book, are going to become more and more important. But it is just as crucial to continue trying to deal with the causes, so that there aren't much, much worse consequences for the future. That said, if you read just one book on the climate crisis this year, "Forecast" should be it.

I enjoyed "Forecast" and have recommended it to several people. What I liked most about the book, is that it was not designed to convince anyone about climate change, but simply described impacts. The book is very well-written -- easy to read. I think it can do more to convince people of the truth of climate change and the overall lack of debate in the scientific community than books that rely heavily on climate data. Because I am a physical scientist who reads several scientific journals; I was aware of most of the facts and expected impacts presented. However, I don't know that anyone has put it altogether so nicely without any inclusion of politics. So, I hope a lot of people read it.

I found this book interesting and well-written. It is not a book by a scientist or someone pretending to do science writing -- it is a book by a journalist who traveled extensively, learned some things on the ground, and reported back on what they learned. It avoids questions about why there is warming, and it avoids speculation about the future: it talks about impacts that warming is having on the world today. It would be a good book to give to someone who was inclined towards being argumentative around warming: it avoids all the standard arguments and just reports on what is. The book shares structure and perhaps a "type" with Jared Diamond's Collapse: a series of chapters illustrating different aspects of a larger phenomenon. It does not pull off the same grand abstract sense of wonder that Diamond is capable of, but it has a greater warmth. I found the sections on Dafur, Bangladesh, and Kashmir chilling: the book does a great job of describing the political/social situation on the ground, sketching out how these complex and fragile places are particularly susceptible to climate change, and then talking about the terrible consequences that are already playing out. In the US, the book describes the reaction of the insurance industry to our increasingly chaotic weather, and how that effects communities like New Orleans and the Florida Keys. The section on how the wine industry is being effected by warming was interesting: tough luck France, I guess.